Find out more about Social CRM Software

What is Social CRM Software?

You can use social CRM software to build deep and lasting relationships with your prospects and customers. This can help to boost your sales and revenue figures. Plus, you can place your customers into convenient categories for further interaction based on criteria such as their needs, buying habits, purchase backgrounds, feedback on your service or product etc. Social CRM software can collect useful data from your engagement with your buyers on multiple channels and provides you actionable insights that can help you get a clear picture of your customer base. You can also use the solution to contact potential buyers, create a sales funnel, and execute loyalty campaigns. For more information, you can read our comprehensive reviews of leading social CRM software apps and check out the current leader HubSpot CRM.

How To Choose The Best Social CRM Software

We are all familiar with the benefits of CRM software, but what is really drawing a line in the sand these days is its social element. CRM programs no longer deal only with information but put the accent on conversations being the core of quality business relationships. At their base, social CRM tools integrate data from conversational platforms and social media, and analyze social ROI in order to adopt marketing trends and strategies. Conversations are being monitored and engaged in, in order to enhance existing communications and to use the positive influence online channel activity. Social CRM tools can either be independent programs or supplements to a traditional CRM – as long as they convert conversational content into relevant information, they are a bonus for your management. But how to choose the best social CRM software for enterprises and SMBs? Let this guide help you!

Get to know each product with free trial

The best way to go is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans from leading social CRM software providers. With that method, you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of each app. The best thing to do is to try the list of services that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our social CRM software reviews, and choose the best social CRM software for your company: Insightly reviews, InStream, Zurmo CRM, Really Simple Systems CRM, Salesboom CRM, Converge Hub, and Highrise.

Targeted Businesses

The need to use a social CRM system is somehow default to every business, because despite the fact that many businesses don’t have a face-to-face interaction with their customers, they still need to introduce a system that provides such on customer-to-customer level. Relationships can tell the story of a business even when the business is not involved, which is exactly why social CRM evolved to be the responsibility of entire teams and corporations.

Small Businesses.Starters and small businesses don’t exactly have the time to enhance customer relationship with social media, due the fact that they work in small teams. Social CRMs can be one of the backbones of their success because it doesn’t let a drop of information slip away, being at the same time an affordable cloud based solution that doesn’t require investments small companies can’t afford.

Medium Businesses. Medium business are the category where business is growing the fastest, and more and more customers need to be served every day. These companies purchase social CRMs in order to manage their increasing number of customer relationships, and to redirect costs from social marketing to more important aspects of their business.

Large Businesses. It’s no big secret that the success of large enterprises goes hand by hand with advanced CRMs, in particular such that summarize all of their resources and possibilities to push business in the right direction. Thanks to their CRM systems, large companies manage to engage thousands of customers at the same time, and to use the fusion of social and business processes to their advantage.

What are Examples of Social CRM Software?

Insightly: A popular CRM for small business with a robust feature suite including pipeline management, contact and task management to make your business more efficient.

Commence CRM: A comprehensive applications set including the traditional contact management, but also lead ranking, project management, and analytics. It is at the same time highly customizable and mobile friendly.

Zurmo CRM: A gamified CRM solution that combines project management with marketing automation, and is hosted in cloud to facilitate association with other CRMs and productivity tools.

InStream: A unique goal-centred CRM platform that combines email and data management, and offers many productivity tools for companies to create and maintain customer relationships.

SalezShark: An innovative platform that preserves valuable customer relationships, and has a variety of smart features to nurture conversions and to increase profit.

Types of Social CRM Software

Social CRM applications can be divided in few categories, depending on their features, advocacy, and the customer experience they provide:

Social Publishing Apps. Organizations and companies use these apps to develop social media marketing strategies, coordinate messages, and discover trends.

Social Media Engagement Apps. These apps ensure a continuous dialogue between the company and its customers, and monitor social media to determine where their brand has been mentioned.

Social Analytics Apps. The apps are an invaluable asset for comparative insight, meaning that they can identify success factors and provide feedback on the efficiency of customer service.

Internal Community Apps. They serve to enhance employee collaboration when contributing to a marketing project, or when attending a specific client. Some of them have external communication modules, used to serve customers and gather per-to-peer market research functions.

Product Advocacy Apps. These are the apps whose presence enables customers to contact directly their brand representatives, and to chat with them on social networks. They can be really helpful when it comes to customers’ product purchase decisions, or exposing content to the attention of search engines.

Key Features of Social CRM Software

Our detailed comparisons indicate that these are the basic features to expect from your next social CRM system:

Support for various social platforms. Social media networks emerge every day, followed up by a serious increase of CRM performance expectations. Responding to all of them is what makes CRM social: it must respond to your need to manage multiple accounts, and to develop social media platforms. Observed from the technical side, integrating a CRM with a social media platform is not difficult, which is why you’re entitled to request an array of integrations.

Analytics. How would the CRM be useful to you if you export data from social platforms, and turn to another program to analyze it? A great CRM has to be empowered to do its own analytics, either using its own tools or third-party plug-ins. In addition, social CRM analytics are advanced ones, meaning that the program is SEO empowered, performs behavioral and sentiment analysis, or compares prices to the benefit of busy marketers.

Brand monitoring. Excellent CRMs perform the exiting task of ‘following’ your brand around: whenever and wherever it has been mentioned or discussed, you will know that!

Super-powerful Lead Management features. The platform should include nothing less than Lead Management, Contact Management, Automated Address Books, Web to Load & Web to Contact, and Email Integrations.

Super-powerful Opportunity Management features. There should as well be a robust opportunity tracking suite, including Notes, Comments, Events, Filters, Custom Fields, Tags, Notifications, Followers, Sharing, and Linking contacts to opportunities.

Benefits of Social CRM Software

These are the benefits companies experience when using a solid social CRM platform:

Enhanced customer relationships. It is all about it! When a company doesn’t have a full picture on its data, its organizational capacity is hindered by the fact that it can’t serve customers properly. With a social CRM, the company gets to audit and track information to identify customers’ needs, and to keep an eye on pricing, contracts, or even personal information which helps it take communication on a whole new friendly level.

Integration of departments. We’re not sure whether there is such thing as a company where everybody knows what to do, but a good social CRM definitely gets close. Departments need to integrate seamlessly, so that a customer won’t even notice his request being transferred from one to another. It is just priceless to be able to skip the ‘We can’t handle your issue, sir, you’ll have to talk to my colleague’ part!

Improved marketing strategies. A clear insight on every part of the pipeline means at the same time monitoring the lead-to-sale process front to end. This way, managers get to evaluate productivity by measuring time/resources spent by the company on every particular activity. So far, it proved to be the best way to monitor employee performance on individual basis.

Unified social notifications. Missing messages and requests on social networks is easy, even for an individual running a private profile. Social CRMs do the magic of highlighting incoming communications, and even better: they unite all of them in a single program. A great CRM is supposed to monitor all channels that are relevant to your business and stream notifications all together for you to respond both to requests and opportunities. An additional benefit is that you get to follow real-time profile updates.

Integration with existent contact records. Putting your social CRM in the centre of customer relationship maintenance means to sync it with your existent contact records. As a result, even the sales and marketing team will be involved in your customer relationships, and will engage into exiting opportunities and productive strategies.

Things to consider when you invest in a SaaS

Infrastructure plays a key role in a SaaS software. If there is an outage, you would not be able to access the service. So, you should pay good attention to the program’s infrastructure when considering SaaS vendors.

Many firms fail to ask their shortlisted SaaS vendors questions about disaster recovery, service level agreements (SLAs), and security. These are key infrastructure elements that need careful consideration when analyzing a vendor.

SaaS is straightforward to subscribe to. All you need to do is go the website and purchase a suitable package for the required number of users. For this reason, many firms pay attention only to the price of the software and not to infrastructure considerations. They may also think that in-depth evaluation is not essential since it is so easy to get started quickly.

But you need to be ready for situations as such as the SaaS vendor going out of business or their website going down. You need to have contingency measures in place to face these situations to make sure they do not have a harmful impact on your firm. It is easy to subscribe to a SaaS product, but think about the effect on your enterprise if the program is withdrawn by the vendor.

Similar Categories:

In case you didn't find just the solution you were looking for here's a list of various categories relevant to Social CRM Software that you might want to explore:

Our Score Read More

Our site utilizes our special SmartScore™ algorithm to examine all the applications in the Social CRM Software category in orded to help you decide on the best possible app. It pays attention to the following aspects: individual functionalities, collaboration possibilities, custom elements, integrations with other services, intuitiveness, help & support, how secure a software is, support for smartphones and tablets, media rating. At the moment, HubSpot CRM is the leader in this category and is recommended by our experts. Following thorough examination it had the best results among its competitors and our experts strongly suggest that you include it as one of the alternatives for your company.

User Satisfaction Read More

An overview of overall user satisfaction with the products in our Social CRM Software category based on our unique algorythm that gathers customer reviews, comments and opinions across a wide set of social media platforms in order to help you make an informed investment decision.

99%

95%

99%

100%

93%

92%

98%

96%

100%

98%

Pricing Read More

Each vendor in the Social CRM Software category will have a different set of pricing plans for its app and each package will include a different set of tools. Below we list the overal pricing for the most affordable package available for each service. Please note that advanced features may cost extra.

free

free

$25

$12

$9

free

$29

$19

$25

$45

Devices Supported Read More

An analysis of what kind of devices and operating systems are supported by the listed B2B solutions in the Social CRM Software category, including mobile platforms and web-based solutions.

Windows

Android

iPhone/iPad

Mac

Web-based

Laguages Supported Read More

Learn what languages and geographies are served by the best B2B solutions in the Social CRM Software category, including apps designed for international markets and prepared for multi-cultural groups of employees.

Pricing Model Read More

Find out what pricing packages are supported by the vendors in the Social CRM Software category to check which one matches your business needs and expenses best. Keep in mind that some apps can offer free or freemium accounts for you to test first.

Free

Monthly payment

One-time payment

Annual Subscription

Quote-based

Customer Types Read More

An overview of what types of clients a selected B2B solution in the Social CRM Software category provides for, from small businesses and non-profits to large enterprises.

Small Business

Large Enterprises

Medium Business

Freelancers

Deployment Read More

An overview of what styles of software deployement are supported by each B2B vendor in the Social CRM Software category. Although the majority of modern SaaS solutions are cloud-based there are solutions might offer an on-site deployment model too.

Why is FinancesOnline free?

FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Please note, that FinancesOnline lists all vendors, we’re not limited only to the ones that pay us, and all software providers have an equal opportunity to get featured in our rankings and comparisons, win awards, gather user reviews, all in our effort to give you reliable advice that will enable you to make well-informed purchase decisions.